Tremendous data growth and evolving requirements for data availability continue to demand innovation in the critical operations of data protection and recovery. Legacy daily backups are insufficient for many business environments today. There is a need for more efficient and more frequent backups which has led to the proliferation of efficient, block level, incremental forever data backup techniques. Current backup techniques have even resulted in Continuous Data Protection (CDP) strategies that may capture and protect every data change occurring at the Input/Output (I/O) level.
Despite these advancements in data protection operations, there are still inefficiencies in current methods. For example, most data protection operations are time-based (daily, hourly, etc). While there is some flexibility and granularity in how often data protection operations are run, time-based data protection operations are, by nature, inconsistent with business data activities. Business data activities are often event-based, not time-based.
CDP solutions protect data at the individual I/O event level, not on a time basis. CDP protects data at a very low granularity of data activity (i.e., individual I/O operations) and thus has significant potential value for recovery. However, there are some drawbacks of CDP operations. One drawback of CDP is that individual I/O operations often do not directly represent any business event. Therefore, recovery at the individual I/O level may not directly represent business value. Yet another drawback of CDP operations is that it is extremely difficult and even sometimes impossible to synchronize individual I/O operations with application transactions. Again, recovery at the individual I/O level may not represent a complete application or business transaction and is thus limited in value. In addition, the potential value of data protection at the low level of granularity provided by CDP is not fully exploited. The granularity of CDP data is typically lost when CDP data is rolled up into snapshots or other backups, and is thus unavailable for a variety of data failure events. CDP data may be saved for longer periods of time by configuring a longer retention period, but this is very expensive in terms of processing and storage. For these reasons, CDP backups, though valuable, are not pervasively used in the industry.